Dhaka’s temperature is fast turning sizzling hot, not just literally because of the summer heat but because of the intense political activity in the capital of this overcrowded country of 180 million people.

On Friday, the country’s interim head of state, Prof. Mohammad Yunus, announced that polls will be held in April next year, disregarding demands by the army and one of the main political parties, the BNP, that elections should be completed by December this year and a newly elected government brought in to arrest the unfolding chaos on the streets of Bangladesh.

If that set the two sides at loggerheads, Monday’s early morning unannounced dramatic return of Bangladesh’s ex-president and long-time Awami Leaguer, Abdul Hamid, from Bangkok, where he had escaped for medical treatment, has set the political pot really boiling.

The Yunus government had earlier banned the Awami League after demands for such action were voiced by the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had played a complicit role in the Pakistan Army’s massacre of millions of Bangladeshis during the liberation war of 1971 and the newly formed ‘King’s party’—the National Citizens Party.

Hamid, a 1971 war veteran and an Awami League MP from before Bangladesh’s independence, is known to be a genial gentleman with a clean record whom countrymen hold in high regard and who has been the country’s longest-serving president. His appearance, after an equally dramatic escape by a regular airline flight despite his name being on a “no-fly list”, seems to be a........

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